i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

my phone won’t even do “force stop” anymore… fairphone 5 running whatever os fairphone ships, and all force stop does is put the app in the background or whatever, if it has an issue the issue will still be there when opening it again.

personally, i’d have pretty big benefits for my homelab if i could use my own ipv6 range for everything. having only a singe public IP is just very limiting.

sadly, my ISP does give out ipv6 for home networks, but i cannot connect to any of them from my mobile phone with the same carrier. so that’s fun. they talked about rolling out ipv6 on mobile networks years ago, but i guess it’ll take a few more…

that said, i did end up finding open source alternatives for all the software i use often, and don’t use bottles much.

honestly, wine has seemed unreasonably complex to me in the past and i haven’t tried since. but Bottles offers a nice easy to use GUI, i do recommend giving it a shot. at least on arch linux it’s super easy to install via the AUR.

the only issue is some apps need additional dependencies which can take some searching to figure out what exactly is needed. the arch wiki lists a bunch of them though, and often the error messages bottles shows will point you the right way.

i’ve gotten almost every .exe to work with it, most immediately, some after a short bit of tinkering.